Four Simple Best Practices for Designing A Poster

Posters have been used by many businesses for a range of purposes. Whether it’s to promote an event, educate an audience about a company’s features and mission, or to engage a following. They’ve been used in print as well as digitally.

After all, what other forms of communication can get information out to the masses with minimal effort?

A tweet or Facebook share is not nearly as effective without some form of visual attached as well.

Whether you’re creating a poster for a school dance, a club meeting or a volunteer opportunity the goal is always the same:

To inform readers about the event.

To encourage readers to participate.

Here’s the thing: to create a beautiful and informative poster you don’t actually have to be a designer.

With the right poster maker tool, it doesn’t even have to take a long time or a ton of effort to create one.

And with these four simple tips, created specifically for non-designers, almost anyone can create a stunning poster.

Only include the most important information

Posters are great for getting the word out about an event, organization or club.

You can quickly promote general information to the masses in an inexpensive and effective way.

And if people want to learn more they can check out the website or social media accounts that are listed.

Plus they are incredibly easy to create for even the most novice designers.

This is why posters are still used in both traditional print and digital formats to this day.

The only problem with how easy they are to create is sometimes people add the wrong information or too much information for that matter.

In fact, many people are unaware that the most important information you need to include on on your poster is the event description, the date, the time, the location of the event, and where people can access more information if needed.

It doesn’t omit any of the key aspects and presents the information in a way that is easy to read.

Anything more than the information above would make it look more like a document or a report rather than a poster.

And has anyone truly ever been excited to read a document hanging on a wall?

It’s doubtful.

When in doubt, follow this hierarchy of information:

Name of the event.

Company or department title

Short description of the event or a catchy tagline.

Date and time of the event.

Location of event.

If necessary, where they can find more information (like a website or social media page or handles).

Those are the only six things, at the max, that you should be including.

Honestly, you could get away with even less depending on your event or organization too.

Just like in this example:

They only check three of those six boxes but still present a beautiful and informative poster.

Sometimes more is less, and when it comes to creating an informative poster, you want to make a visual that stands out and gives your audience the information that is most crucial. Anything in addition to that isn’t necessary and can be sent in a follow-up email or newsletter.

Keep your design simple

Having too much written information is not the only way you can overdo it and ruin your poster.

The main goal is to inform people, and if your design hinders that goal, you should reconsider how you are laying out your content.

One of the easiest ways to design a simple poster is to only use one central image or primary graphic.

This is where a lot of new designers can run afoul. The assumption is that people need to include a lot of images or icons, but a single image is actually more effective because it doesn’t pull their attention away from the important facts.

The main image may catch their eye, like in the example below, without being too distracting.

In this case, it actually adds to the poster because it primes the audience on what the poster’s central theme is before they even read it. Even though we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, so many people do.

Another simple way to make sure your design compliments your information is to have a single bold or heavy title font. This is referred to as typographic hierarchy.

This font should not be used anywhere else on the poster and serve as a point for your audience to look first.

In this Job Fair poster, you can see that the main title font takes up nearly half of the poster.

This is not only helpful in drawing people in, it also gives a lot of structure to the poster.

Additionally, people know exactly where to look first to get the most important information.

Now if the main message of your poster was buried in small text at the bottom of the page, it would be hard to grasp the main takeaways.

The final easy way to keep your poster simple but effective is to use a lot of negative space.

Just because you have a huge canvas for your poster doesn’t mean you have to use it.

In fact, some of the best posters barely use half of the available space. Like in this Yoga Poster below:

The designer was able to effectively get a lot of information out to its audience without the overall message coming across as too boring.

Like I said above, with poster design less is better than more in most cases.

A great example of all these tips coming together into one awesome poster can be seen below:

But the best example of using negative space is seen in a Motivation Poster:

It has a combination of negative space, a single image, and a bold title.

They all work in harmony to create a poster that feels big without being overwhelming.

Nadya Khoja contributes a monthly column on Infographics. Nadya is a Visual Content and Digital Marketing Specialist. She is part of the team at Venngage, an online infographic maker. Nadya has a B.A. with Specialized Honours in Devised Theatre and a Master's Degree in Digital Media with a focus on Audience Engagement and Immersive Experiences. When she has time, Nadya directs, produces and sound designs for experimental and interactive performances.

About Nadya Khoja

Nadya Khoja contributes a monthly column on Infographics. Nadya is a Visual Content and Digital Marketing Specialist. She is part of the team at Venngage, an online infographic maker. Nadya has a B.A. with Specialized Honours in Devised Theatre and a Master's Degree in Digital Media with a focus on Audience Engagement and Immersive Experiences. When she has time, Nadya directs, produces and sound designs for experimental and interactive performances.